Pages

Tuesday, May 26, 2015

It is with profound sadness that Nicole LaViolette’s colleagues announce that Nicole passed away on Friday, May 22, 2015. Our faculty and our community will never be the same without her.

Nicole graduated from the Common Law Section, winning the gold medal, in 1996. She joined the Faculty as a professor in the French Common Law Program in 1998 and became a member of the Common Law Honour Society in 2006. Nicole taught International Law, Human Rights, Refugee Law and Family Law, in both English and French. She maintained an active academic and community education profile right until the very end, publishing two co-authored books, one on family law and one on cycling law, in the past year.

Nicole received numerous prestigious awards for her exceptional teaching and graduate student mentoring, her prolific research and publishing, her dedication to faculty administration, and her community service. In 2014, the Association des juristes d’expression française de l’Ontario honoured Nicole with its Ordre du Mérite; and the Lambda Foundation renamed its award at uOttawa the “Nicole LaViolette Friends of Lambda Prize,” recognizing excellence in research, public policy and laws affecting LGBTI people. Most recently, Nicole was awarded the SOGIC (Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity) Hero Award from the Canadian Bar Association.

Somehow Nicole also found the time to train as a competitive cyclist and skier. As Dean Nathalie Des Rosiers said when she communicated news of Nicole’s passing to the Faculty “Nicole was a visionary professor, fighting for a just society, just for its immigrants and refugees, just for its LGBT community, just for its poor and vulnerable.”

Nicole will be remembered for her dedication to others and her tremendous courage, as well as for her many achievements. All of Nicole’s colleagues at Common Law wish to express their heartfelt condolences to Nicole’s life partner of 24 years, Lisa Hébert, to Nicole’s father, her siblings and the other members of her family.

Details about Nicole’s memorial service will be posted here as soon as they become available.

Last summer, Nicole created an endowment to support two of her most passionate interests: immigrant and refugee students, and the French Common Law Program at uOttawa. The “Nicole LaViolette Fund for Immigrant and Refugee Students Enrolled in the Common Law Program in French” will offer funding support to these students and projects promoting their academic and professional success. Donations made to the “Nicole LaViolette Fund for Immigrant and Refugee Students Enrolled in the French Common Law Program” will be matched 1:2 until June 30, 2015, effectively increasing the value of your gift by 50%. For example, a donation of $20 is transformed into $30. Donations in recognition of Nicole can be made to the Nicole LaViolette Fund via the contact information below, or by clicking here to make a donation directly online.

Saturday, May 23, 2015

Ireland Votes for Equal Marriage

Dr. Sinead Ring

Ireland has become the first country in the
world to introduce equal marriage by popular vote. The National Returning
Officer made the announcement at 6.57pm local time, announcing that the amendment
passed by 1,201,607 votes to 734, 300. That is 62.1% Yes to 37.9% No.

Only one
Constituency voted No (Roscommon-South Leitrim - and that was by a margin of only a few per
cent). Dublin South East was the highest YES vote at 74%.
But the rural parts of the country were also strongly in favour of equal
marriage: 61.5% in Galway West and 63.8% in Wexford.

The Amendment means that two people of the
same sex can legally marry and these couples are afforded the same
constitutional protections and rights as married couples of the opposite sex.
These constitutional protections include the right to autonomy or freedom from interference
by the State. Children of married same sex married couples will be included in
the definition of family for the purposes of the Constitution. See Fergus Ryan’s blog here
for more details.

Legislation will now be passed to allow for the amendment to take place. Minister
for Justice and Equality and Law Reform Frances Fitzgerald TD stated on RTE
Television that the legislation would
be passed this summer.

The referendum result is a wonderful moment
of victory for the campaigners for Equal marriage. Those of us who worried
about the idea of a public vote for a minority’s fundamental civil right to
marry have to think again as the country is swept along in a tide of joy and
political awakening. Just check this
link out to see what I mean: https://twitter.com/search?src=typd&q=%23marref

Of course this vote is also about more than
marriage; it speaks to a new political engagement of young people, of a new
separation of Church and State. And it feels wonderful.

Friday, May 22, 2015

Today Ireland will the only place in the
world where the electorate will have a choice whether to enshrine marriage
equality in its basic law. Voters will choose whether to vote in favour or not
of the following proposed amendment to Article 41 of the Irish Constitution:

“Marriage may be contracted in accordance with
law by two persons without distinction as to their sex.”

Further
details can be found on the Referendum Commission’s website. Details of legal opinion in favour of
marriage equality can be found over at Human Rights in Ireland.

The Amendment has deep links to Canada. As
Angela McConnell notes in her chapter in Defining
Events (Manchester UP: 2015) the campaign for full marriage rights for
same-sex couples by MarriagEquality has its roots in a 2004 case taken by Katherine
Zappone and Ann Louise Gilligan. In 2004
Katherine and Ann Louise were married in Vancouver. They sought to have their
marriage recognise by the Revenue Commissioners in Ireland to avail themselves
of tax benefits accruing to married couples in Ireland. While the action was
unsuccessful, the case (the KAL case, as it became known)
drew attention to the inequality of treatment of same sex couples under Irish
law.

Civil partnerships were made legal in
Ireland in 2011. However as Fergus Ryan explains here
there are significant differences between civil partnerships and marriage under
the Irish
Constitution, which specifically protects marriage
as a the “natural primary and fundamental unit group of Society, and as a moral
institution possessing inalienable and imprescriptible rights and superior to
all positive law.”

Thursday, May 21, 2015

University of Ottawa Professor Jennifer Chandlerspoke with CBC News on Wednesday about
the need for more people to register their willingness to be deceased donors in
order to address the need and to reduce risks to live donors. (segment starts at 2:29)

From
April 16-19, 2015, a group of feminist activists and academics met at York
University to reflect on the legacy of the 1970 Royal Commission on the Status
of Women. Entitled Shifting Paradigms,Enduring Legacies: Reflections on the Royal Commission on the Status of Women at 50, the symposium provided an opportunity to reflect on the effects of
the Royal Commission in Canadian society prior to its 50th
anniversary in 2020. A number of keynote speeches and panels were held over the
four days to recognize the work of the Commission and the ongoing experiences
of marginalization that many women in Canada face today.

The
Royal Commission, which began in 1967 and released its report in 1970, was the
product of extensive participatory consultation on issues affecting Canadian women.
Public consultations across the country, along with 468 briefs and 1,000
letters from citizens, informed the work of the Commission and were reflected in
the 167 recommendations made in its report to the Government of Canada. Almost
fifty years later, some of the Commissions’ recommendations – such as equal pay
legislation and matrimonial property rights – have been (at least formally)
addressed. Many others, particularly those related to substantive equality, are
yet to be realized.

Symposium
participants were asked both to reflect on these legacies of the Commission, as
well as to envision future priorities and directions for gender equality in
Canada. In the contributions and the conversations that ensued, a number of
important themes emerged.

Nostalgia

One
of the key themes of the symposium was nostalgia. A number of speakers
reflected on how the Royal Commission affected their lives and how it inspired
their work. Several speakers described the consultation processes of the
Commission, describing how its hearings were a critical moment of engagement
for many women across Canada, that is, a means for women to be heard and
recognized by the state in a way that may not have occurred otherwise. Some speakers also spoke of nostalgia for the
sense of possibility and the public engagement that occurred at the time of the
Commission, and this was repeated by younger scholars reflecting on a time that
they did not themselves know. The lament for a time when change seemed more
possible was apparent throughout the symposium, that is, a time when a strong
relationship between feminists and the state was seen as an inroad to
improvements in the material conditions of women’s lives.

Neoliberalism

In a majority of the presentations, a sense of
nostalgia and loss was tied to the ascendance of a neoliberal paradigm that
focuses on the privatization of once-public services and an individualization
of once-collective concerns. The decline of the Keynesian welfare state and the
related changes to economic and social relations has also come with a neo-conservative
politics committed to the home as the site of social reproduction and a
re-inscribing of traditional gender roles and “family values.” At the same
time, the neoliberal paradigm has brought an increasing internationalization of
care work, a trend profoundly shaped by globalized and racialized forms of
inequality. In her presentation, for example, Meg Luxton spoke of
the “Global Care Crisis,” in which Canadian women’s increased participation in
waged labour, combined with their ongoing disproportionate responsibility for
unwaged work, and the lack of social services (including a national child care
policy) has led to increased dependence on paid care services provided by women
as precarious temporary workers.

Indeed,
a common thread throughout the symposium was the impact of internationalization
on Canadian public policy in the years since the Commission. While some
participants highlighted the negative implications of transnational policy
regimes like free trade, others had used transnational mechanisms strategically
to create positive change. Shelagh Day, for example, discussed how the Feminist
Alliance for International Action (FAFIA) has used international law to hold
the Canadian state accountable for missing and murdered Indigenous women.

The Women’s Movement in Canada

The
symposium also brought an opportunity for critical reflection and analysis of
the Commission’s relationship with the Canadian women’s movement, both then and
now. Many participants felt that the Commission had strengthened the feminist
voice inside the federal government, as evidenced in the subsequent creation of
the Status of Women Canada (SWC), and in civil society through the creation of
the National Action Committee on the Status of Women (NAC). However, others
contested this view, debating whether the Commission’s achievements have been
exaggerated or romanticized by some activists over the past five decades. In a
keynote address, Monique Bégin (who was Executive Secretary of the Royal
Commission and went on to serve as a Liberal MP and cabinet minister) shared her
critique of the Commission report, noting that despite the changes it inspired,
the Commission failed to consider some areas critical to enabling women’s
equality, including violence against women. In general, however, most
participants agreed that the Commission’s legacy for the Canadian women’s
movement has far outweighed its shortcomings.

Shifting
Paradigms

The name of the symposium—Shifting Paradigms, Enduring Legacies—suggests both that the Royal
Commission altered the direction of the women’s movement in Canada, and that another
paradigm shift is needed. Participants presented a number of concrete steps and
specific solutions for Canadian social and fiscal policy, but running
throughout the discussion was the role of the state: what is the future role of
the Canadian state for gender equality in Canada? Can the currently neoliberal state
be reclaimed as an equality seeking mechanism? Should it be reclaimed?

In general, participants agreed that the state
as a mechanism remains useful and that “the state” should not simply be
conflated with the governing party. The diverse presentations showed the
usefulness of multiple levels of government, including provincial and
transnational levels, as sites for feminist action. Despite the variety of
lenses they brought to the question of the ideal future state – lens that
include human rights, intersectionality, decolonization, and social justice –
symposium participants presented a vision for a more gender-equitable Canada
over the next fifty years.

The authors would like to acknowledge the
symposium’s organizer, Professor Barbara Cameron of York University, whose hard
work made this successful symposium possible. The symposium was organized
through the York Centre for Feminist Research and was supported by a grant from
the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).

Amber J. Fletcher is Assistant Professor of
Sociology and Social Studies at the University of Regina. Her research examines
the interaction of gender, climate change, and public policy with a particular
focus on women in agriculture.

Alana Cattapan is a PhD Candidate in Political Science
at York University and a research associate at Novel Tech Ethics at Dalhousie
University. Her work interrogates the relationships
between citizenship, social policy, bioethics, and gender. @arcattapan

The McGill Law Journal has just posted a podcast discussing the Pickton case and missing and murdered Indigenous women with Elaine Craig and Ellen Gabriel. Elaine Craig published a paper on these issues in the McGill Law Journal in 2014. It is available here. Here is the abstract:

Women
are disappearing. Sixty-nine of them disappeared from the Downtown
Eastside of Vancouver between 1997 and 2002. Northern communities in
British Columbia believe that more than 40 women have gone missing from
the Highway of Tears in the past thirty years. The endangered do not
come from every walk of life. Most of these women are Aboriginal. Many
of them are poor. To be more precise then, poor women and Aboriginal
women are disappearing. Aboriginal women in particular are the targets
of an irrefutable epidemic of violence in Canada today.

Robert
Pickton is thought to have murdered almost 50 of the women reported as
missing from the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver between 1997 and 2002.
The criminal prosecution of Robert Pickton involved an 11-month jury
trial, two appeals to the British Columbia Court of Appeal, an appeal to
the Supreme Court of Canada, 12 million dollars in defence counsel
legal expenses, a two million dollar upgrade to the New Westminster
courthouse, nine million dollars in Crown counsel expenses, 12 million
dollars in judicial/trial support and management costs, and 76 reported
judicial rulings. This paper, through a combination of discursive and
doctrinal analysis of these 76 decisions, examines what was (not)
achieved by the Pickton trial. It discusses three areas: the judicial
representation of the women Pickton was prosecuted for murdering; the
implications of the jury’s verdict in the Pickton proceeding and; the
impact of the Pickton trial on the families of the women he murdered.

The
paper starts from the premise that it is correct to characterize these
murders as a product of collective violence. Colonialism, political and
legal infrastructure, and public discourse – and the race, class, and
gender based hegemonies that these processes, institutions, and
practices hold in place – produced a particular class of vulnerable
women, the police who failed them, and Robert Pickton. The paper
concludes by suggesting that the outcomes of the Pickton prosecution
both highlight the limitations of the criminal justice system and offer
an analytical framework for examining other institutional responses
(such as the Missing Women’s Inquiry) to the kind of collective violence
that gave rise to the Pickton circumstance.

* The Latest & Greatest from SSRN

Jane Bailey has posted a new article on SSRN, entitled "Gendering Big Brother: What Should a Feminist Do?" Here is the abstract:

Set
in the context of an imaginary dialogue between a straight, white, middle-aged
radical feminist law professor and her Cyberfeminism student, this paper
explores various theories about stereotypes and other tools of discrimination,
as well as the emancipatory potential of digitized communications for
equality-seeking groups. It suggests that the Snowden revelations about
widespread government surveillance of citizens and concerns around “big data”
present an opportunity for coalition between feminists and civil libertarians
on the issue of surveillance. In the final analysis though, the paper cautions
that this context may simply reflect a moment of interest convergence in which
collaboration is unlikely to produce real change for subordinated groups unless
the discriminatory tropes that disproportionately expose members of
subordinated groups to surveillance are first addressed.